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Welcome from Provost Mohamed S. El-Aasser
When I accepted the position of Provost in October 2004, I articulated three major priorities for the Provost's Office designed to help ensure that our campus community encouraged the personal and intellectual growth of all of our faculty, staff, and students. These priorities include developing the best environment for all Lehigh faculty and staff; articulating the intellectual signatures of Lehigh through scholarly work and distinctive programs; and creatively enhancing the total learning experience for all of Lehigh's students, both undergraduate and graduate.
During the past several years, we have made significant progress in working towards these goals. Thanks to the generous Alfred P. Sloan Award for Faculty Career Flexibility, received by Lehigh in 2006, the university has intensified its efforts to support tenure-track faculty seeking to balance the demands of career and family, through tenure-clock extensions for parenthood, family and medical leave, and assistance to dual-career families http://www.lehigh.edu/~insloan. In order to foster scholarly creativity and generate discussions which transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, Lehigh has also recently launched several programs which contribute to the university's ongoing efforts to be a richly innovative, interdisciplinary institution. The IDEAS (Integrated Degree in Engineering and Arts & Sciences) program enables interested students to pursue dual degrees in engineering and the liberal arts, and the South Mountain College provides students with a unique opportunity to explore both practical and theoretical problems within a dynamic, interactive learning environment. The Global Lehigh initiative is a bold effort to make internationalization in all its dimensions a signature for Lehigh education, encouraging intellectual exchanges of Lehigh faculty, staff, and students with institutions and scholars throughout t he world. See Message from Alice Gast and Mohamed El-Aasser Regarding Global Lehigh, December 2007.
In November 2007, President Alice Gast reported on the university-wide strategic thinking process, which she had initiated in the summer of 2007. Looking ahead, the university is using this document as a starting point for developing a highly integrated university-wide strategic plan. Please continue to refer to the President's website, for more information regarding this process and the many ways in which members of the Lehigh community can become involved in the campus-wide strategic thinking process. In order to be truly successful, this process calls for the engagement of all Lehigh constituencies, including faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students.
I hope you find this website a useful resource. Your suggestions for improving this website are most welcome, and questions or comments regarding the office's current programs and activities can be directed to provost@lehigh.edu.
Vita for M.S. El-Aasser
